S1 Ep14: Neuroscientist REVEALS: The Truth About Discipline, Laziness, Stress & Dopamine - TJ Power

DOSE is an acronym for our 4 brain chemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Dopamine is your motivation. Oxytocin is your connection. Serotonin is your mood and your energy levels. And then endorphins is kind of your physical fitness and your capacity to tolerate stress. You feel really apathetic and you're sitting at your computer and you can't get yourself to do the annoying tasks you need to do. That's because you've depleted these dopamine molecules in your brain.

I want to talk about the actionable steps that people can take.

Step 1 to getting that motivation increase is just— Meet TJ Power, a neuroscientist on a mission to transform our understanding of mental well-being in today's digital world. As the founder of the Dose Lab and author of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Dose Effect, he blends groundbreaking brain science with practical strategies to empower people to manage their mental health. 57% of the UK's calories that we consume are ultra-processed foods. They're very strategically designed to make your dopamine go mental. And then suddenly you end up with a relationship with food where you're like, fuck, I literally can't stop eating this stuff. Good mental health comes from doing things you don't want to do. So when we go on the Instagram Reels or we watch the porn or eat the sugar or smoke the vape or drink the booze, we immediately experience this massive elevation in dopamine. The only way out of addiction to this stuff is to just—

Wow.

Yeah, crazy.

That is crazy.

I know.

So TJ, welcome to Wake Up.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for coming on. I was actually looking before the show trying to find a show that covered, you know, you growing up and covered, you know, the influences on your life now that you are a successful entrepreneur, now that you obviously have focused so much on, you know, productivity and psychology. And so do you mind talking a little bit about your childhood?

Yeah, let's do it. How young do you want me to start?

Well, I'm— one of the questions I had, and I think it's it's really important is that your dad was like a sort of quasi-entrepreneur mentor, had a lot of experience in, I suppose, business building, but also was very early on in social media effectively. And so what was it like having a dad and parents that were entrepreneurial?

Yeah, it was cool. Mum and Dad launched this company called eCademy, which is a social network in 1997, the year I was born. So, and they were very like open parents about talking about business. So as long as I can remember, every single conversation around the dinner table was always about business and how the world of business worked. And they were specifically obviously very interested in social media. So as soon as all the pages, all the different social medias came out, they made me the @TJpowers, thinking like, oh, maybe he'll want those one day.

Wow.

So they were pretty on it with that sort of thing. And My dad's a very motivating person. He, every time he sees me, he says like, what progress are you making? And he always, like, every time we say goodbye, he always says, keep pushing, keep pushing. He used that sentence every time. So I do, I do think he's been like a very good trainer over the last like couple decades.

I think that's like such an interesting thing is I've had a lot of entrepreneurs on here recently who, when I asked them about their parents, their parents have had some entrepreneurial endeavors. And a lot of the time people like car boot sale.

Yeah.

Or, you know, buying and selling of products. But it's amazing the impact that having, you know, like goal-setting, pushing type parents has on you.

Yeah.

I always talk about the fact that I do— I had like Roxanne Difusio on the other week, and my dad at Christmas or New Year's always gets us as a family, each of us, to write down and submit to him our New Year's resolutions.

Let's go!

And we've been doing that since we were like, like before I can remember.

Like, what are you, what are you going to achieve this year? I might do that when I'm a dad.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm taking that forward in like in my life because you become so much more intentional about what you're, what you're trying to achieve. And so I suppose with your, with your mum and dad, was that like evident that you would become an entrepreneur early on?

It was interesting because they were very motivating as parents, but they were ridiculously chilled from like a behaviour point of view. So at school, like, I was an absolute nightmare and I didn't succeed at school at all until I was about 17 and found psychology. I was just not thriving from like an academic point of view. So they were like very chilled in that perspective, but they were just very supportive of if I had a goal, they would just like really help me try and flourish at that goal. And I had random goals as a kid. At one point I was like an archer and wanted to be like a professional archer, went really hard down.

I've never heard that on the show before.

How random is that? Then I went deep into the world of golf for like 7 years and set my whole life on Every night me and my dad would talk about me winning the green jacket, and still hurts me to this day that I am not going to achieve that. Maybe my son will if I can pass it down to him instead. But yeah, I think they were just— if I had something in mind that I wanted to get good at, they were just very supportive and very like good at guiding me to stay focused on that goal.

And for context, your dad taught Jay Shetty the concept of open, random, and supportive.

He did.

So how did that come about? Like, so Jay credits a huge part of his success to that. And so how did that— how did Jay Shetty being— be coached by your dad?

My dad coached a company called Accenture. He was helping lots of the MDs and stuff there build Twitter accounts and stuff when all of that wasn't a priority to the world and everyone was like, oh, what's the point in social media? He was one of the early people saying, no, it's important, social media is important. Jay joined Accenture at a similar time that Dad was doing that coaching, and Jay really took on that advice of like, make social media accounts. And I wouldn't— my dad doesn't credit Jay's success to him. Dad just says that he helped him think about some of these ideas. And he has this concept called open, random, supportive, which is how you basically approach life. And then he has this alternative way in which we can approach life, which is called closed, selective, and controlling. And it's an idea I use in my mind a lot—open, random, and supportive—and it seems to have been very impactful on Jay. It seems to have been very impactful on me, so I'm pretty down for it.

And how come at an early age you became so interested by psychology?

I had a variety of things I navigated in my mind from pretty young. I had super severe OCD from like 5 years old, so I went deep into the world of OCD and like had loads of different compulsive behaviors. And my mum was amazing with it. She kind of didn't let me find out I had OCD as like a diagnosis, and she kind of told me I was coming out of school for like brain training and that it was actually like an advantage, this thing that I had. So I had this like different framing of what it was because I was such young kid, and she helped a lot to calm the OCD, but it just meant that my mind had some tendencies towards like intrusive thoughts and anxieties and stuff like that. Then that got channeled very much into golf, and when you play high-level golf as a kid, you get like psychologists and stuff like that. So when I was like 10, 11 years old, I had a psychologist, which is super young to be in that world. It actually ended up making things feel a bit too serious for me for the golf. It kind of took some of the fun away, but it meant that I was exposed to that world very early. And then 14, 15, 16, started getting very addicted to basically everything the world has to offer that's addictive— alcohol and cigarettes and porn and all that sort of stuff. And then I had this unusual brain, OCD, struggling a bit in my mind, discovered you can study psychology and thought, that's probably what I need, to be honest, for my own brain. Maybe I'll be able to help others when I learn about it.

I read as well that you, you say that you had quite a lot of loss between the age of 16 and 21. Yeah. And I was reading that you said that had a profound impact on you being very interested in psychology.

It did. When I was 16, the first person I was super close with passed away. She was my cousin called Vicky, and she passed away when she was 29. So she was super young, and it was like, boom, that's a whole new thing to navigate. And that was super painful. The following 4 years, 4 more people passed away in my family that I was close to. So it was suddenly like, holy shit, like, I now have to get used to the experience of grief and I carried the coffins and it was just like a very hard time. And during that period I started drinking a lot of booze and I would always get super upset kind of when the booze was wearing off at the end of a night. I'd get like super emotional, as lots of people have probably experienced with alcohol. And I then started studying psychology and discovered that just in different conversations with my family, and all of them were also navigating this pain, I had like a slight natural inclination towards calming a brain down basically. And I found learning a lot about my own mind, I could calm a brain down. Then I thought, Okay, like none of school worked for me, none of the subjects connected. And then suddenly this psychology one was like, cool, I kind of seem to have some kind of way in which I could communicate these ideas. So I started getting super focused on that.

And I've also read that before you became so known for neuroscience, like you were quite overtly a party boy.

Like I went super hard. Like I really was the person in the group that wanted everyone to party as hard as they could. Like ridiculous.

What age are we talking about?

I don't know, when I first started going to parties, I don't know, 14 years old, I was like super excited to be going to a party for the first time as a kid at school. And then once I got to kind of college age, I started stepping it up. University, start stepping it up again. And then through to about 21, 22, I really loved quick dopamine. Like, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking and staying up super late and That was what my world was oriented around, and a lot of it was for the pursuit of fun. But I think a part of it was definitely also like I didn't necessarily have that good mental health, and I'd like have really intense periods of pleasure, then periods of quite extreme lows that would then be kind of— I'd get rid of them by going back into the deep pleasure. And now with a slightly more aware and mature mind, I kind of realized what I was doing back then. But at the time I just thought, yeah, I love partying, that's super fun.

Were you aware of all the, the sort of dopamine effects? Were you aware of all the science and everything at that period of your life? I had a good idea.

I started studying psychology at university at 19, so I started to learn it. However, university didn't go super in-depth on dose, on these 4 different chemicals. I don't think anyone had noticed it spelled dose back then, which is pretty convenient that I have to figure that out. And the, uh, I knew a bit about it, but I would say discovering dopamine as a chemical and truly understanding what it is, why I wanted it in that form, how to get it in alternative forms actually solved the addiction to partying because I discovered like what I actually was seeking for when I was chasing the partying life and discovered an alternative way to get that same feeling in my brain but without screwing up effectively. So the discovery of dopamine then led to a massive interest in what other kind of neurochemicals are living within me that could also solve some of my pain and get me feeling really good.

Did you have a specific wake-up moment? Did you have a specific, you know, rock bottom moment that— I really did.

I went to a festival in June in my third year of university and went as hard as I possibly could at that festival and reached a point— normally you'd stay at these sort of things till like 2 or 3 AM, and it was about 9:30 PM and I had to leave. I was like, wow, my brain is not in a good way. And I left, and it was about a 45-minute walk to get home from this festival. And I walked back, and I just remember thinking like, I think I've actually just taken this too far, this partying thing. My brain was not feeling good. And then I actually can remember it really well. For some reason, it was just like an important conversation in my life. And I sat in my bed, I got home, and I made like a smoothie in a Nutribullet, which I would never have done back then. But I was like, I need something to heal me. My instinct was like, make a smoothie. One of my friends had a smoothie maker. And I sat in bed with this like big Nutribullet cup and I just thought like, shit, like if I want— I really wanted to be an entrepreneur and I knew I couldn't go get a job because I just like wouldn't have ever been very good at having a boss based on my school experience. And I was thinking this lifestyle is just not going to lead to a good life. I'm not going to be able to have an impact on the world. I'm not going to be able to make any money. And I had a very serious conversation with myself for a few hours. And I never went back from that night. I like, that was a really significant moment for me.

And so when you say you never went back, is that the next week you stopped drinking?

The next week was the end of university, uh, for that year, and I went to live with my grandpa for like 3 months because I thought that would make me much healthier than like being around all my friends. Lived with him for like 3 months. He lived out in nature, so I thought I'm— he lived near a golf course. I thought I'll just walk every day try and break my phone addiction because everything I knew from psychology, I thought if I break that addiction, it might have a knock-on impact on the other addictions. At that point, I went like vegan. I'm not actually a vegan now, but I just went into like basically like a spiritual retreat quest. I went vegan, I started meditating, and I went really hard in the opposite direction of what I had been. And I don't live in that, that world now, but it was a very good like rebalancing of how I wanted to approach life.

I'd say a lot of people could do with a rebalance. I think, I think that I feel like the problem with social and, you know, the media now is like you have to be one thing or the other. And yeah, I think a rebalancing just resets you to a better relationship with lots of different things.

Yeah. And from a brain chemistry point of view, it just gave my brain chemicals a chance to stabilise and stop living in these huge fluctuations and It was really impactful. I saw a whole nother world that can also make you feel good. And I had this perception that either kind of success in my degree, that was something that did make me feel good, so just like the success world, or massive pleasure. I thought that was what happiness was. I thought that was the whole picture of happiness, success and pleasure. And then discovered there's a whole other world that can also make the brain feel really, really good and fulfilled and much more peaceful and calm. And began the pursuit of that world and that led to this whole new life I live now.

So you've trained 80,000 people. Yeah.

Which is crazy. It's been fun.

It's been hard work. So you've trained 80,000 people in effectively to control their productivity, their neuroscience, how to be their best selves. You went through that period there of what sounds like a, you know, a break from the challenges. So when you take on these people to train them, what is the, the arc that you take them through? What is the change you're trying to push them to have?

A real awareness, first of all, of where they currently are in terms of the experience they're having in their brain. We have these very specific 8 baselines that cross across the 4 chemicals, so they get a really good understanding of how motivated are they to do hard things, how good is their attention span, their relationships, their confidence, energy levels, stability of their mood, their ability to tolerate stress, and their physical fitness. These 8 things, they can get— then get a good idea of where they're at. And they may come to discover that they're pretty low on a large amount of these, like we all are pretty much in the modern world, because we're not living in an environment that naturally is serving these brain chemicals. We're living in an environment that's kind of screwing them up. And with that awareness, we then begin to target certain behaviors that will begin to significantly shift them. We start with the world of motivation and attention span because in order to get into a really good, healthy state from a mental health point of view, from a performance point of view, you need to be motivated to do hard things and you need an attention span. And those two things are getting killed by the phone. So we go very specifically with the first action in all of those towards the phone and begin to alter the relationship with that. Then we go on a cool journey from there.

And so obviously you talk a lot about the dose framework. Yeah. And so for the audience that haven't seen it, can you break down what the DOSE framework is and how people are using that in their everyday lives now?

Yeah, so DOSE is an acronym for our 4 brain chemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Ridiculously convenient that it spells DOSE. And each of these chemicals has a function. Dopamine is your motivation, oxytocin is your connection, serotonin is your mood and your energy levels, and then endorphins is kind of your physical fitness and your capacity to tolerate stress. And when we look at how people apply this, when they go through, they begin to see shifts on those things. So suddenly they feel a little bit more driven to do hard things with the dopamine. We really focus on getting their relationships to be much more connected. In our modern world, for example, we're now focusing a lot on dopamine as our form of relaxation. Originally for humans, oxytocin connection with humans was relaxation. A simple example of that is if you're sitting in bed with your partner and you're both scrolling your phones instead of cuddling and talking, you're choosing dopamine over oxytocin. And that's happening across all relationships— parent relationship, kids, family, friends. So we get them thinking about oxytocin as their form of relaxation and getting them much more connected. With serotonin, we try and get their mood much more stable because a lot of us have a very irritable, fluctuating mood. And then the endorphins, we try and physically strengthen them like hunter-gatherers would have been physically strong. And we can go into why that's so important. And then when you improve your physical capacity as a human, your ability to tolerate stress begins to improve. So we see these shifts begin to occur.

And so dopamine, then its original use was to, to do useful things. It was.

And it's really interesting to always look at the evolutionary rationale for these chemicals just because we discovered them 50 or so years ago. But that's not when they became a thing. They obviously became a thing when humans were created. And we've been living in this human form for about 300,000 years. Our prehominid ancestors, about 2 million years. So we've been like developing these chemicals for a very, very long time in a very different experience of life. And there's this big theory called evolutionary mismatch, which is this idea that the brain chemicals were designed for something different to what they're experiencing today. Dopamine specifically was just a chemical that made us feel satisfied when we did the really hard things. So we had to do annoying stuff like scratch rocks together for hours to make fire. Or go out hunting for 5 hours whilst you're starving or build shelter or cook food. And that was a lot more complicated back then to try and cook food. And we needed a chemical that made us want to do the really hard stuff and made us think, yeah, I'm so happy I did that thing. And dopamine was that for us.

And obviously nowadays we don't have that same challenge.

We don't. We do things that are still satisfying, like even something as basic as changing and washing your bedding. You know, it's when you get into a freshly washed bed, you feel pretty satisfied that you did that. So that would be an example of natural dopamine. But we've hijacked the capacity to access high levels of dopamine. So when we go on the Instagram Reels or we watch the porn or eat the sugar or smoke the vape or drink the booze, we immediately experience this massive elevation in dopamine rather than slowly experiencing it, which is how the chemical evolved. That massive increase when we engage with these quick forms of dopamine then causes a really big decline because there's only a limited amount of dopamine in your brain at any time. If you use it gradually over 3 or 4 hours, it's restoring itself and building itself back up. If you were hunting, for example. If you use it all up in 20 minutes when you watch porn or you go on your phone, suddenly you crash because you've got no dopamine left in your brain. And if you're in a state where sometimes you feel really apathetic and you're sitting at your computer and you can't get yourself to do the annoying tasks you need to do, or you can't get yourself to focus on things, that's because you've depleted these dopamine molecules in your brain.

So dopamine is at its absolute highest when you're doing the, the activity. So when you're scrolling or watching porn or having a drink, that's when it's its highest.

That's when it reaches absolute max in our modern world. You also would get a really high level of dopamine if you successfully achieved a goal you had been aiming at for ages. But that's a nice natural long-term journey to get in there. But when you watch porn, for example, even if you compare porn to social media, you'll notice that when you go on a porn website, even as you're scrolling through, your brain starts to feel very, very good. It's a massive, massive pleasure. And then suddenly you're watching things, you might be watching a variety of videos, and your brain hits this huge climax of extreme pleasure. And then suddenly afterwards, you typically don't feel that good after you've watched porn. You get this like massive dip. It's because you've used up all this molecule. And even if you compare porn to sex, you'll notice you don't get the same dip after sex that you do after porn. You might feel a little bit tired and sleepy after sex, and that's quite natural. But the reason is, is because the sex has involved a journey of effort. You've begun to get intimate with that person and you've hopefully serve them in some way throughout it. And you've just put in effort to the experience. So the dopamine has been a bit steadier. When you watch porn, it's zero effort and you can get it done in like 2 minutes. It's this massive fall. And a more effortful life is what creates a higher dopamine level naturally.

I suppose that's the, the, the big thing about achieving goals. I mean, you're— we're talking right now about like a micro, you know, going on social media, getting a huge high and then crashing. Yeah. But even when you spend weeks and months and years pursuing a goal, immediately after that goal you don't necessarily feel, you know, completely fulfilled.

Yeah, you can get a dip after even completing a long-term goal. There's this great psychologist called Andrew Schultz from Cambridge University who looked at where our dopamine is actually its highest in the pursuit of goals. And you basically see that the highest moment of dopamine is actually just before you successfully attain the goal, not when you get it. Actually slightly dips when you get the goal. And that's like, if you, if you think about that evolutionarily, dopamine is the chemical for motivation and attention. If I was actually hunting down a deer, I need the maximum amount of dopamine in the last 100 meters before I get to the deer, not once I've got it. It makes sense for it to calm once I've got it because it would be useful to have it just before you get there. And sometimes like this is what they call like what happens when people win gold medals in the Olympics or win the lottery or celebrities become huge and like reach the pinnacle of success. Sometimes depression-type symptoms can follow that experience. And depression and dopamine are very interrelated experiences. And if your dopamine crashes hard, it means that you need, from a goal-based thing, you just need to make sure there's a next goal for you to be striving towards. And I've actually navigated a bit of this in the last few weeks. Like, I have been striving very hard for the last 4 or 5 years, working unbelievably hard. And I've been really happy that the book has begun to really take off and my social media is doing great and the lab and the research studies are going great. And I realised actually over the last few weeks of like really observing it that a little bit of apathy had kind of come into my system at thinking like, oh, like I've been working, working, working, like I've actually managed to achieve a point where I'm quite happy with how things are going. But then for me, that then leads quite like a depressive experience in my brain where I feel quite flat. And over this last week, I did like a 7-day social media fast to try and get out of that world so I could get focused on like what is the answer to the little flat feeling I was having in my brain. And then I've gone through the process of setting myself some new targets. And the targets can be in your personal life and in your work life as long as it's in the pursuit of something. But having some new targets in mind has led to my dopamine thinking, okay, so we're climbing back up to something. And it's important to understand that dip.

I heard you talk about doing that exercise while in nature. Was it 7 days in nature and asking yourself, you know, your purpose and your goal? Yeah. I thought that was quite powerful. Is that what you just did?

Yeah. So we, me and my girlfriend, she supported me while I was like, because I go through, I just have quite like volatile mental health. So I go through some pretty big dips. When they come, they come hard. And, uh, that's why I basically built Dux because of those experiences in my mind. And yeah, I slowed down a lot. I spent a lot of time in nature on my own, in the nature, just like walking and just allowing my brain to try and come up with an answer and a lot of the time we're just so distracted. Like, we go on walks, but then we always have the headphones in and we're like productive and we've got podcasts playing. You're like doing this. Yeah, you're doing it. And that's cool. Like, there's an element of that, but I think sometimes you just need pure nature where you're just a human. You're basically a hunter-gatherer wandering around out there, no tech on you at all. And out there, I just like kind of ask myself some good questions. And so what am I really in the pursuit of? What do I want next in my life? Is it personal stuff? Is it work-based stuff? Then ultimately your brain begins to instinctively find something. If you're out there for a while, like if you walk for 2 hours, you really find some answers to big questions. And we just never let our brain go that far into our thoughts normally. Like we're always back to writing the notes about our next project or going into WhatsApp and getting lost and forgetting about it altogether. And you'll eventually identify something that feels instinctively like, yeah, that is the big thing I need to be orienting towards. And then because you're out there and you're still walking and you haven't got a phone on you, you just start thinking, how the hell am I going to get it? And then you really get solidified in your mind as to what that suit is going to be. And dopamine needs that experience.

Spoken about this before, but when I sold my first company, the evening we sold it— well, obviously we sold it in the day and it got signed and everything. It's like a huge boardroom and you sign all the documents and everyone's there and it's exciting. And then the second you sign, you crack a bottle of champagne. Yeah. And with how happy you are and how happy the acquirer is, normally you will go and get incredibly pissed. Yeah, for sure. And that's exactly what we did. We sold the company, we all got incredibly pissed. I certainly remember having quite a blurry evening as opposed to an amazing evening. There was like no intentionality to it. We were just all getting so pissed. We didn't necessarily even know or particularly have that much affection with our acquirers.

But yeah, when you get drunk, you do.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, it would have been an amazing evening to spend with like my 4 best friends having quieter drinks. Yeah, talking about it, you know, stuff. Anyway, the— we didn't, you know, we did the get really, really drunk thing, and that's fair. And I remember I had to get to a thing the next morning, and so I was like really hungover on the tube, uh, and the money hit my bank account, and you get the notification from the app that like it's come in. And I, I like, on a crowded train, burst out crying. And then for the next like— and I'm not at all a crier, for the next like 2 hours, for some reason I was like struggling to get myself moving. I've never really been someone that struggles with motivation, and I think it was that I'd kind of achieved a goal that for, you know, 10 years I'd been building this company. We'd sold, and I was like sat outside a tube station like crying and being like, oh, I can't, can't get myself moving. Interesting. Which is wild.

A few things would happen there because whilst it's very exciting, there's also this huge sense of relief when you achieve a goal. And part of the emotion would have probably actually been in the relief that you were probably pushing your system harder than naturally a system is designed to be pushed for a decade in order to make that occur. And your heart and everything literally is physically operating at a very high level to keep the system running hard. In order to make that outcome occur. And your brain receiving that information and then sending to the body, like, we've actually done it, we're done. Suddenly the body is like, oh my God, I can actually soften. And there was probably a lot of pent-up emotion throughout that decade that just got its chance. Just go, I can just release it. I can just release. And then also your dopamine, like, because you're no longer in pursuit for a period of time, would have just fallen. So literally that would have made you physically unable to move. Like, at the core of dopamine, it literally initiates movement. That's why Parkinson's and stuff is so related to dopamine, because it interrupts something in there, which I won't go too down because that would just confuse things. But yeah, your body would have just had a huge relief. Serotonin would have gone up, endorphins would have gone up. It would be an interesting thing that happens. And if that ever happens in business, you just want to feel it, like really just go into that full experience, let the crying happen.

I suppose when you're therefore talking to someone, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs will watch this show if we're talking to someone about setting an intentional goal and being mindful of how dopamine works, what are the steps they can take?

Having a big vision is great. So like thinking, oh, okay, so I've got this big thing. Like at the moment for us, one of my biggest vision is— visions is the world of Dose Kids, and we're looking at books for kids, and we're looking at new software for teachers and stuff like that. And that's like a really cool big thing that as an entrepreneur, what can happen is you set this big vision, and thinking about it gets you all really excited, and you get dopamine just off thinking about the idea. It's great. It's Oh great, I love this, this is the best. And you tell all your team and you get a big dopamine hit telling your team. But then the most important thing from a brain chemistry point of view is it gets broken down into very, very small chunks of goals that will then lead to that outcome occurring. And you almost, once the vision is set and you think that's definitely what I want, you almost release that and think, okay, I'm just going to release that and I'm going to orient my whole way in which I operate on tasks and how I operate my day to just very small steps. That can lead to you just consistently making sure your dopamine is naturally elevating. Every time you spend 30 to 40 minutes focused on a specific task towards that goal, you're getting such a healthy natural dopamine increase because you're in a deep state of focus. You're making progress towards that longer-term goal. So I'd say that's the big thing. Set the big vision, but then break it down very small.

I'm writing a book at the moment and I'm going to credit you in the book for what you just said, that that is like such a it's like the thing we were talking about with my dad setting us goals. Yeah, like one thing was he was like, set the big goal, but then he was like, how are you breaking down the goal?

Yeah, it's so important to break down. And with the book, like, I never expected— as the person I was and kind of the identity I built in myself as TJ from school would never ever have written a book. Like, my teachers at school will find it hilarious if they ever see that book. They'll think definitely a different teacher. Well, they will see that book. There's no chance they'll think there's actually me that wrote that book. And I wrote every word of that book, of course. And when I went to approach it, I really thought about it before I started. Like, how am I going to break this into a dopamine-based experience so that I can absolutely nail this out? Because as you have, you've also got a whole business to run and a team to coordinate and stuff like that. So you can't just give up on everything else and just write the book. And having deadlines is ridiculously important. Deadlines that you would perceive as unmissable. Like, you have to create a framework in your head that that is the deadline, otherwise the book's over and it all comes to an end. Like, I remember when I signed mine, it was like July and HarperCollins gave me until something like March 1st to write the book. And I was like, if I actually have March 1st as the deadline, I'm going to write the whole thing in February. So that can't be the deadline. So then I broke mine into 4 parts, the OSCE, which obviously it lent itself towards that, and then 5 parts per chemical. But whatever the book you're writing is, you could find a way to break it into these things. And then I had these specific dates that each part had to be complete and then specific dates that each action within those parts. And having those just meant like it was such a breeze to write it because I just look at my calendar and it would say, write part 1, section 2. And I just think, all right, that's what I've got to do. And I bang out and then I'd go on to my other business stuff rather than having this like, oh my God, I have to write a whole book. So it made it way less overwhelming and my dopamine was staying so consistently high, so the motivation remained.

Are you like that with the rest of your life? For example, scrolling on the phone is Easy, feels good quick, then feel shit after. Yeah, going to the gym, uh, feels shit. Yeah, up front and even before you go and probably even when you arrive. And it takes really sort of 10 to 20 minutes, 20 minutes probably, yeah, to get into feeling good about it. But then afterwards you're like, I'm gonna go every single day.

Yeah, I mean, it's so fit, you know.

So are you like incredibly disciplined now?

I, because of how much of an addiction brain I have, I have to live a very regimented life. I don't really have a choice because if it was just sort of, I can scroll my phone whenever I want and I'll go to the gym whenever I want, all I would do is scroll the phone and watch the porn and smoke and drink alcohol and eat loads of sugar. Like, I wouldn't be— unless I had like a framework, I wouldn't be able to do it. Like, for example, I posted on Instagram yesterday that I put a lot of time in and I'm really curious if it did well. You know that feeling of, I wonder if it did well. And I haven't yet looked and I posted at 3:00 yesterday. And even before this podcast, like I'm using the dose logic for everything. So I want a really high level of dopamine in my brain right now so that I can concentrate while you're talking to me because I have a terrible attention span. So if I didn't have high dopamine, I might be like thinking about that stuff over there. And then on the train here, I'm faced with two options. I had an hour train here, like work on my computer, build natural dopamine, or check my Instagram. Instagram and get all like hooked into that world. And one of them will lead to nice dopamine now, a nice healthy level, and one will crash it. So I didn't check, and I told myself on the train on the way home I can check, and then I can enjoy that all dopamine experience. But I have— and that's that way in which I'm operating. I'm operating with all my stuff, my food and my movement, and my— I track the steps every day to make sure I do those. Like, it might seem overly disciplined, but I think if you really want to thrive and you're also kind of an entrepreneur psycho addict type person, ADHD, I think having structure is really useful.

I interview a lot of entrepreneurs. Why are entrepreneurs so addictive? Yeah, addicted to things. Yeah, I feel like that's so common in all the conversations, you know. You, you very rarely get— unless you're very intentional like you are. I'm super intentional about my phone, but I have an incredibly addictive personality. Yeah. Why are entrepreneurs so similar in their addictiveness?

Entrepreneurs are dopamine chasers more than the average person because it's risky to become an entrepreneur, and it's a more kind of chilled, straightforward life to get a job. And I don't judge anyone getting a job, it's amazing, you can thrive in companies and build awesome stuff. But entrepreneurs have a greater desire to chase highs, effectively. And typically entrepreneurs probably also struggle with lots of addictions. Like, it's— you might be really good at building businesses and making money, but you also might really addicted to things. And there's this whole theory of how the brain developed whereby we spent 300,000 years primarily as hunters, particularly as the men. We would have been really just like constantly— all we think about is hunting food and making fires. And that was like what our brain would have spent a huge amount of time doing. 12,000 years ago, we invented farming. Farming radically changed civilization because suddenly a huge proportion of the group could slow down effectively and not spend all day hunting for food, but could instead begin to like write and talk and communicate and do art. And everything slowed and a huge amount of new things were invented 12,000 years ago. There's this whole theoretical framework that people with this ADHD addiction dopamine brain effectively still have the hunter-type brain from 288,000 years ago, from that time, whereas people with a kind of slower-paced brain probably have more of this farmer-type brain. I imagine a lot of the entrepreneur-type people just have this hunter brain that's really looking for pleasure. And like for hunter-gatherers, that was super useful to have that brain. You wanted this absolutely insatiable, hardworking addiction to hunting for food because that's how you'd survive as a group. So it was a very useful brain for them. But the people you can imagine that would be good hunters in the group, if you turned up and gave them phones and sugar and stuff, it like the Hadza in Central Africa, the best hunters would get the most addicted to all this stuff because they'd be the dopamine chasers.

I think a lot of people would be like, I, I want the, the success or the outcome that a lot of entrepreneurs experience, which is fair enough. And I think that, you know, it's fair enough to have the goal, but so many of the entrepreneurs that I know are the people who are the biggest strugglers with like addiction, you know, challenge, depression, ups and downs, and can never switch off. For sure. And I think that is a huge challenge of being potentially one of these, you know, personality types is that you almost don't know how to switch off.

Definitely. And my whole family like this, we're all entrepreneurs, me and my brother, my sister, my mum and dad, and we all struggle with addiction and depression. And that is just an experience that we all have and we're all trying to help each other with it and with Doze. And they all live by Doze as well. Like we have made huge, huge progress. Yeah, I mean, you got to live by Doze now, guys. It's the brand. But, but it actually works. It works. So we've got really strict— we've all quit drinking alcohol because we're just too addicted to alcohol. And I don't think you have to quit alcohol, but I think if you've got a really addictive relationship with it, it could serve you massively as an entrepreneur. I don't think any of us would be successful entrepreneurs if we hadn't quit alcohol. And we've got strong relationships with our phone and things like that. And I just think you have to acknowledge that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you've got to get some of the addictive stuff in check and you have to almost realise that it's a massive superpower. It's a massive advantage to be able to be addicted to things if you get addicted to the right stuff. That being said, the switch off thing is insanely hard because your brain is always wanting to make progress, always wanting to win. And even things like if you put Stripe on your phone and you have a B2C product, like I've experienced that recently. Yeah, never on the phone. That's a nightmare. Stripe on your phone is like it's like a slot machine addiction. It's literally scroll up and then see if you win, and that's like pure slot machine addiction. And yeah, things like not having social media apps, not having these things on your phone, are really important. And building frameworks whereby you really physically separate from technology is really key. And I think technology addiction is the, the most disruptive to the success. Like, if you're spending Saturday and Sunday always checking the phone, always checking the business, I don't think you're going to build as successful a business as you could. I think I call it like Serotonin Saturdays and Serotonin Sundays, whereby that chemical, which is all about nature and slowing down and resting and napping and eating healthily and stuff, that chemical becomes my priority. And I try to really go— like, you can go a long time without the phone if you have— if you're with your family, for example, if you're caring for your kids, you might need them to be with you to be away from your phone if you had to check it for that reason. But if you're with people and you get rid of the phone, sometimes you think, oh, that'd be a bit boring. Like if I can't constantly check it. But there's this kind of boredom barrier that you surpass whereby your brain actually forgets about the phone if it's physically not on you. And the restoration that occurs in your brain if you have a long time, just no technology at all, whether you're eating or hanging out or walking— walking would be the most ideal, like building a fort with your kids if you have kids. That would— there would be no better activity on a weekend than that, basically. We need to have a switch off time if we want to really succeed.

I actually, at the moment, these days, don't struggle hugely with my phone during the week. Okay. The— I definitely have always struggled with alcohol. Yeah. And continue to. Yeah, it's always, always telling myself that I have booze in check. And then, you know, instead of going for like 3 drinks, you go for about 50 drinks.

You can't get booze in check unless you don't like it. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I have a very good friend who's sober who's always like, 'Why do you still drink?' And it's like, well, because I've got it in check. And then you always realize you don't have it in check. But the, the booze is hard, man. The, the phone thing is only bad for me when I'm hungover.

Yeah, for sure, because your dopamine is like—

yeah, exactly. So it's like the worst cycle ever. During the week, I'll exercise loads, play lots of sport, like can exercise twice in a day and run the businesses, feel great about it, not, not addicted to my phone at all. Yeah, because you're in such high levels of dopamine. Amazing, amazing, amazing. And then come, you know, Friday, I'm like, haha, I can have a hangover. And then the hangover day is like, I mean, permanently on the phone, which is just a wild experience.

All of the addictions become very hard to manage on the hangover. The unhealthy food gets ordered, porn is much easier to watch on those days. All of it becomes a nightmare with— because you're with these dopamine vesicles that are in your brain, they're all sitting in this thing called your ventral tegmental area, and they're literally little bubbles in your brain. And when you drunk the booze, you used all of them up. They all got sent to the reward centre, this thing called the nucleus accumbens. And you literally sitting there with an area of your brain that should have dopamine in, it's got none in. And then your brain's like, I hate this feeling. And then it's like, how can I rush myself out of it and scroll the phones? And I understand the desire to drink. Like, it's very nice. Getting drunk is a really good experience in your brain whilst you drink it. If you are going to drink, I think it's very important that when you wake up, you just go outdoors as quickly as you can to start walking through the hell that you're in. And like, just— and you can walk to go and get a coffee, for example. But just like, don't start with the phone because as soon as it starts with the phone, then you're never getting back out all day. And you're also massively increasing the depression for the next week. That being said, do you reckon there's any chance you'd ever not drink booze, or is that basically just not an option?

I would say it's like a— and you're asking on a pretty good day because I'm—

I got really drunk on Friday and it's Monday.

It's Monday and I'm still— so how's the depression? I'm physically still very aware, okay, that I got drunk on Friday. For sure.

Sometimes the Mondays and Tuesdays are actually the worst. Like, once the physical part subsides, the mind— the mind gets it. I've actually—

I would always say, like, especially I've never really had that bad of physical hangovers, you know, and I've always, I've always been, you know, pretty good at like getting up and getting on. It's, it's only now that like there's, there's days where I don't have anything to do and I'm hungover. Those are the worst days. It'd be better if someone was like, hey, you organized to play tennis with me this morning. For sure, I would get up and go get the brain chemicals going again and you'd be fine.

Yeah, and that's a good thing to even think about in general, is trying to plan things. If you're going to go try and plan things the next day that make you take action, what would you say is your favorite thing about the booze?

So the end of a typical week will be— and these days, like, very good at having— people would assume I'm super busy, but I just have an amazing team now, very regimented with my time, not really on my phone that much. Cool. But it's like the end of the week is like a— it's a release from being quite clearly pent up during the week.

So it's like this chilling out experience, chilling out.

I get the same thing from sport. I always wish, like, on Friday evening, rather than going to the pub for a beer after work, I just went and played, like, tennis or paddle or went to the gym or whatever.

So you would like to do that?

Yeah. And I, I think that sometimes, sometimes that part of the brain wins and I do go and do that. But most of the time— it's funny because, like, the— you know, I said earlier, when I sold my company, the feeling of like, okay, I'm, I'm like free and healthy and good. I actually stopped drinking for ages. Interesting. But then that company then effectively fired me and tried not to pay me my earnout. Lovely. Yeah. And so I went back into this—

where's the booze?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I went back into this like fight or flight. Yeah. Which brought back boozing into my life. And then accidentally or other, I've spent the last 5 years building other companies. Yeah. And I ended up winning the legal case. Oh, let's go. But after all of it, my wife always says, she's like, you're still just like suffering slight PTSD of what happened to you. And so she's always like, that's probably why you drink, is that you're fighting so hard in the week and then you get to sort of chill on the weekend.

And would you say ultimately it leads to a really chilled weekend? The opposite. It's so hard, the alcohol thing, because I can't imagine that a human could like drinking alcohol more than I like drinking alcohol. To me, to me, it was 10 out of 10, best, best thing in Well, that first, like, half of the first pint was pretty good. And then that's it. So was the second pint. And the fourth pint, fifth pint, they're kind of like you're then just sort of maintaining the feeling. Exactly. But those first few felt good. But I could never do the first few. Well, even if I did, I'd kind of go home pissed off that I wasn't allowed more. Yeah. So I appreciate how hard it is. I just— my mum and— no, my dad and sister. My dad had to quit booze. My dad got bowel cancer when he was like 55. Really bad stage 3 bowel cancer. Easily could have lost him and he had to make the decision that booze had to go. And he loved drinking. He was a glass of vodka and whiskey and red wine every day. Like, that's— I grew up as like making the vodka and tonic and handing it to him and it was basically half vodka, half tonic. And so like he then had to quit booze, which was just such a shock to watch him quit booze because like I didn't think of him as like a big boozer, but he definitely was. But it was just the norm. So then that's just what it was. And he was at that point, he was drinking so much, he was never drunk. He was just like, oh, it didn't even get him drunk. And then I watched— this was like 7 years ago or something— but then I watched this like monumental transformation happen to him as a human being, like how calm and happy and motivated he became. And I was like, what the hell? Like, he wasn't like a super angry person. He had quite a lot of like, urgh, in him. And I thought that's just who he was, but it was actually alcohol. And a few years ago I've like begun the journey and I haven't— I wouldn't say I'm fully sober. I had a drink at Christmas. And I had a drink last summer in Prague. So like, I still have had some alcohol.

That's not too bad.

It's not too much compared to used to have 50 pints a week. I just want there to be like one tiny little bit of your brain that thinks it's possible to one day not have it.

And I say, like, one of my best friends, you know, he hit it more than most. And he—

The ones that hit it the hardest have to leave.

Well, they have to, you know, he had to hang up his boots. Yeah, but he was a total professional before. And now that he's sober, like, I mean, honestly, life transformational stuff. So yeah, it plays on my mind all the time. And I suppose for people where it does play on the mind, I would say that the— I'm in a bad period now. Mm, with the booze. With the booze. But I've had good periods before, and they always started with like, how do I do 4 weeks without? And then once you do 4 weeks, continuing is actually way easier because you have motivation from the change. Yeah, it's when you slip back in and then you're, you know, like, I quit smoking a long time ago and I quit drugs a long time ago, and those things again were like, uh, I had to, I had to string together a sort of 2 to 4 week period and then be like, oh, okay, this is okay.

What would you say is the most important thing to you in your life at the moment? Like, is it, is work like a big thing in your mind?

Is like your wife, or have you got kids? No, I'd say that, that topic has been the biggest thing for us in our lives, in that we've had a lot of miscarriages and IVF. And well, I suppose when this comes out, hopefully we'll be on, you know, 12 weeks. Okay, I hope so too. So we're 10 weeks now, and we're both, you know, cautiously very optimistic about the whole thing. And that is a very dominating thing in life. Yeah, that's— and I do think at the moment that's probably had a bit of an impact on the booze because it's, it's quite like a pent-up thing. Plus I also run like 3 pretty large businesses for sure.

Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. And the, that pressure with the kid is also a lot of pressure. And have you explored the whole fertility world in terms of your own health and things like that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, uh, we're like the best clinic in the world now. Cool. We've done all the work and yeah, I mean, it was a so it was something that could only be solved scientifically, as it were.

Yeah. And I think the, the tricky thing is, is during the tougher times, like periods where things haven't gone well for me with my work or grief or breakups can be pretty intense on the brain. The go-to is up the booze during the pain, but really it'd actually be better to up the booze during the good times. And from a brain chemistry point of view, because at least your brain will bounce back. Yeah. Whereas upping the booze during the painful Sometimes it's very hard for the mind, for the, like, for your mental health. It's just very hard because the booze just makes, like, the worry in our mind go wild. Because you know how it turns off all your worry when you drink it? It's bliss. It's like, boom, I just don't worry about anything now. Everything's great.

That's actually the thing I think I always chase is the, you know, first, first 2 or 3 drinks.

I know, suddenly you're in just pure peace. You're like, ah. And it's because it literally, like, turns off the thinking in the prefrontal cortex. It makes your brain just not think about anything. Except exactly what's right in front of you. It's like artificial meditation, basically, when you drink the booze. Yeah, it's a tricky one. And also navigating tough stuff is hard, but I definitely would be all for entrepreneurs trying to drink a bit less alcohol because it's just like, I don't, I don't think there's a single lever that could be pulled that could have a bigger impact on mental health and performance than that lever.

So outside of alcohol.

Yeah.

What are the things that are causing like a lack of energy, low mood, and a struggle to focus for people?

Yeah, I would say this is interesting. We can go to the whole world of serotonin here. So this is then a different lane. Serotonin evolved as a chemical that just wanted to make sure our body was thriving effectively, not just our brain. Like in our brain, we were chasing dopamine to keep our brain rewarded so that we could have things to to eat and so on. Our serotonin actually wanted to make sure that our body was getting lots of rest and sleep and it had loads of good nutrients in our stomach. And 90% of this serotonin chemical is built within our gut. And a huge amount of the difficulty we have with experiences of low mood and feeling massively exhausted is hyper interconnected with low serotonin levels. In the UK particularly, because sunlight is a huge factor in serotonin, we get very low in serotonin in these months, over this sort of 6 months from sort of November through to March, we get very low in this chemical. And there are some very simple changes you can begin to make to your day that would lead to your serotonin stabilising and having a much more consistent mood and much more consistent energy.

And so you get a lot of these statements these days like Gen Z are really lazy, you know, or to be fair, you know, I'm Gen Z. Are you Gen Z?

Yeah, just about. I crept into Gen Z. I'm 1997. Wow. So yeah, Gen Z are lazy. Yeah, they can be. They can be.

They go. But I remember, so I'm 34, like 35 this year, and I remember when we were growing up and we were like entering work and everyone was saying like millennials are super lazy. Is that due to modern technology? Is that something that's always been the case? Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, I do think the tech is the ultimate thing that changed. I think both generations got access to alcohol and nicotine and stuff like that, but the younger generation is the first generation to get real access to quick-form social media content. It's just crazy, crazy addictive. And It's interesting because you have the tech addicts us and then we get addicted to the dopamine and deplete the dopamine, which takes our motivation away. So then we're not motivated to do anything at all. So there's that element. The other thing with the tech is it's not just the fact you're on the tech, it's the fact you're not doing the other things that would restore the chemicals. So it's like a multitude of challenges taking place because the fact that a person that's Gen Z is spending all weekend scrolling their phone rather than maybe back 10 or 15 years ago, people would have spent the weekend more going outside and seeing their friends. It's then they would have got a load of serotonin, which would have restored their energy and their mood. So then they're likely next week to actually have more energy when they're working. So it's kind of the tech is interfering with the other chemicals at the same time.

Mental health feels like it's on the rise and has been accelerating in recent years massively. I would say like COVID again, like when I was going through COVID, I was like a business owner and had, I think we had like 70, 80 staff, and most of them were young. Uh, and I noticed within our own company, but also just in the world at large, mental health just spiked. And I do think to myself that if we're all spending so much time glued to our phones, we aren't doing anything else. And so is that, is that the the main reason in your mind as to why mental health is on the rise?

Yeah, I think the phones are right at the core of the challenge. That's the thing that has shifted. But it's really important to kind of bring it to a bigger idea of mental health itself is a message effectively coming to our brain to try and create change. The reason you feel anxious and depressed or stressed or burnt out or whatever it might be isn't just your brain to make you feel that way because that's a fun thing to do. Is your brain trying to create change in your experience. For a hunter-gatherer, if they were to be like an 18-year-old in the tribe and they were a hunter in that group of the tribe and they were like, I'm not going to do anything, can't be bothered, I'm just going to sit around. If they sat around for days on end, their brain would create the experience of depression and make them feel really sad and unhappy to try and get them to do something that would make them feel good again, a.k.a. going out and hunting. And like the experiences we have, whether it's anxiety or depression, whatever it might be, are sophisticated messages largely coming from these brain chemicals to try and orient us back to optimal survival as a species. And our brain wants a life that has lots and lots of effort, hyper-connected to human beings, and very natural with our food and our movement. And we are basically becoming a very— our experience is becoming very easy, very disconnected, very unnatural, and very sedentary. And mental health will only get more and more severe over the coming decades if that's the path humanity continues to pursue. And the more we can actually hear the message and think, oh, mental health is getting bad because our behavior is changing, then you begin to think, okay, maybe I should actually listen to the message and change my behavior as a result.

So talking about changing behavior, I want to talk about the actionable steps that people can take to increase productivity, to increase you know, their, their output to increase happiness. So you say, and it is obviously a mantra, it's like take action as soon as you wake up. Yeah. And so don't put the phone next to the bed. Yeah. And what do I do immediately after that?

You sit at the side of the bed if you struggle with snoozing your alarms. You literally just sit at the side with your, like, lean forward so that you don't go back to sleep. And I have to do this every day, so I'd love to just lie in bed and do nothing. Well, I'd love to lie in bed and scrub my fur, but that's what I'd want to do.

With a bite.

With a bite. That's porn. But unfortunately, that's not going to lead to me thriving, so I'm not allowed to do that. So I will straight go straight to the bathroom, start brushing my teeth, because then that's just like an effortful, boring action. Brush your teeth, you splash cold water on your face, dopamine's going up. I go to the toilet in the morning, I'll have a book in there, so I'm forced to read. I don't even like reading that much, but I know it's good and it's good to learn. I used to love reading, but now because we're trained to like short form, reading's becoming harder and harder. And reading is perfect for building this slow dopamine, building our attention span. So I read on the toilet, come back, make the bed, and I've just taken like 10 minutes there to do something that's effortful. On days where I'm really being healthy, I'll do things like go to the gym and stuff like that. But the most important thing is just wake up, go to the bathroom, and start getting ready before you get the quick dopamine.

And I saw you post that you can increase motivation by 48%. And so I think to myself, firstly, how do you know the percentage? And secondly, how does someone start that motivation boost? Is it like you say, good morning routine? Is it good practice at the beginning of the day?

Achieving that increase is through optimising dopamine in a natural way. The way in which we measure it at Dosav is with these Likert scale measurements where people are getting baselined before they go through through Dosh training. We're finding out their daily motivation levels and attention spans across 20 different metrics. Then we're re-measuring on the same assessment tool in order to try and see the alterations that happen on average. Some people having bigger averages, bigger increases than that, but 48 is the average that we see in that specific study. That was with Accenture. Step 1 to getting that motivation increase is just much less time-consuming short-form content. That's like the most fundamental thing, the short-form content on the phone. Is the thing that's broken our dopamine system. And even if you look at the addiction to the phone prior to COVID, we were nowhere near as addicted to the phones. And then TikTok got invented, all the social media companies copied TikTok. It was the fastest way to access the dopamine. Then phones became addictive. Like when I look at university, university before COVID if you went on Instagram, you would see some pictures, you'd see some like IGTV videos that were like 2 or 3 minutes long that were really boring and you'd watch some stories and then you'd be bored and you would leave. Whereas now, because of this unlimited feed, you don't actually get that bored. You can stay in there for a very long time. It's just mass consumed. So a big part of this is just no short-form content in the morning. I would— we really orient people towards like before 10:00, there can't be short-form content consumption so that the dopamine is beginning to rise. Then the additional effortful actions of making your bed and being more disciplined in your home. When people sit down at their desk, we get them to actually use their computers, the first point of technology they see in the day rather than their phone. So they'll open up their computer and they'll do their WhatsApp and email and the necessary work tasks, but they won't have even entered the world of a phone whereby lots of other shit can happen effectively. And that start of your day is the key.

It's funny you say that. I watched Black Hawk Down this weekend.

Oh cool.

Is it good? Yeah, it's a great film. Like the most amazing cast ever.

Much better for your dopamine, by the way.

A movie. Yeah, well, I was thinking because again, like, you know, you know Dan Murray, like, we talk a lot about how, like, I've got pretty good phone habits. Yeah. But recently I've been worse than I've been in a while. I don't know why, like, busyness, etc. Maybe I'm drinking more. I was, like, bored in the film. Yeah, for sure. I was like, I was, like, lying on the sofa, my phone was upstairs. I was, like, watching this movie, which is— if you watch it, it's, like, impossible to be bored. It's, like, the most incredible cast ever before they were all famous. Cool. And it's like a war movie, okay, action-packed. And I was sitting there being like, that's a bit boring, thinking to myself, how is that physically possible? Yeah. And it must be that now I'm so trained to like burst, you know, dopamine. Yeah.

In the short form, at a faster rate, basically. Your brain is expecting— it doesn't work like this, but it's expecting to be able to burst, say, 50 bubbles every 5 minutes, whereas like a movie might burst 10 bubbles every— Yeah, like I was not—

I was tempted to skip the dialogue.

That's what's happening to our brain. It's so funny because I'm in schools at the moment and we teach them these phone fasting challenges. Yeah, to do different things without their phone. And lots of it's great stuff— nature and exercise and food and socialising. But one of them is just to try and watch TV and people think, yeah, what's the difference? What's the difference? What you do? And all the parents come in, they're like, you're telling our kids to watch TV. But if you go back 20 years, the whole world was like, don't let your kids watch too much TV, it's bad for their brain. And I'm literally now in schools all over the world saying, watch more TV, it's better for your brain. Not that the other things aren't better than TV, but TV is not that overstimulating for our dopamine at all. You could watch a movie every single evening and your dopamine system would be fine. And it's really important to just become aware in your brain that it's okay to feel bored. The only way out of addiction to this stuff is to just be okay with that feeling and just go, I'm bored, and just like sit with that fear and then eventually get used to it. And it's really not that bad, that feeling. And you start thinking, I'm really bored. I mean, and if you don't want to listen to the shit in your head when you're bored, which is what we're often using the phone for, is avoiding the shit in our head, then you have to try and get more present. So you're like, okay, I'm going to really pay attention to what they're saying. Otherwise I'm going to think about these things I don't want to think about. And you start just having a brain that can slow down and be present. And that's what our brain is just desperate for.

And so if you're ranking the activities that we're all exposed to now, so that's a good question.

You know, TikTok being the worst, probably. Maybe like porn being the worst. Porn's the worst. Porn's the worst. Okay. Porn, porn, drugs, similar.

Porn and drugs, bottom. Yeah. Then short-form content.

What are we clarifying is worst in terms of in the moment, the most negative impact? Yeah. Yeah. Because short-form content is probably the worst because it's the most widely used.

I was going to say, that's what I thought, like, that thing with porn is like, you're not using porn nearly as much as you use short-form content.

Yeah. I don't know how much people are using porn, but the, um, this— if it's the scale of just like what's worse for society because of engagement, then yeah, short-form content is the most difficult one. And then I probably put sugar pretty close to that. Sugar is very disruptive for the dopamine, makes us all depressed and addicted to things. So, and it's very easy to just constantly be snacking on the sugary type, not like literally powdered sugar, but like sugar is in all the ultra-processed crap that we're addicted to.

So I put short-form content, sugar, But like gaming and gambling and yeah, you said TV's not too bad. So I'm sort of imagining the scale where sort of, you know, lots of really wholesome activity like walking in nature here, TV somewhere in the middle, short form somewhere at the bottom.

Accurate, accurate. I would say everything is about how quickly is this dopamine going up effectively. So if you take going for a walk, like walks, you've also got serotonin because of the nature, but you're getting dopamine because of the effort. But you go on a walk, you don't set foot out the car on the walk and think, feel amazing, but you feel good by the end of the walk. Dopamine slowly rose. You take a short form content, it's the opposite end. It's you immediately feel good. I could open Instagram right now, watch a reel, and it would get me in because they're so good with the feed. It would immediately get me. So it's immediately feel good. So you got this huge spike. If you take something like Gaming. If you were playing a game like Candy Crush on your phone, it's immediate dopamine. They literally draw the lines for you and you're like a little kid, just like pressing it around like a kid playing with a toy. If you take a game that's requiring tons of strategy in order to get hold of reward, like you're really having to put in attention and effort, the spike will be slow. So gaming wouldn't be that bad. In schools, I'm really promoting gaming for the kids over scrolling short-form content. I'm of course promoting hanging out with each other and going to a park. Yeah, but the, the gaming, if it's slow, if it's connected with other people and if it's effortful, is good. The gambling provides monumental dopamine release. It's very tricky for our brain. All of the social— everything about our addiction world is built upon the gambling system. The variable wins. If you get rats basically and you put them into a little box and then you give them access to cocaine. If they get cocaine when they press the lever, so you press it once, guaranteed cocaine, they'll press it quite consistently whenever they feel they need the cocaine. If you say to them, if you through conditioning get them to press it every 3 times and they get the cocaine, then they'll get really good at consistently whenever they feel like they need the cocaine, the dopamine, they'll go hit it 3 times, then they'll go and they're happy with that. If you make it random and it's like they might get it on one click, they might get it on 10, they might get a 7, they go completely mental. They just can't stop tapping it. And that's exactly how gambling works. You might get it first time, you might get a 10th, you might get a 5th. It's random. And how our brain evolved in nature is reward was random. You couldn't guarantee when you were going to find the animal or the fruit or the honey. And our brain really gets addicted to random reward. And that's why even our social media feeds, They give you crap video, crap video, really good video that you really, really like, and then 5 crap videos, really good video, then straight away next video, really good video. And it's varied. And the more varied it is, the more addicted you get. Wow. Yeah. Crazy. That is crazy. I know.

What are the natural things we can do? I mean, cold water therapy, for example, is massive on social media. Oh, the irony. Yeah. That every time I ever see it or it's talked about, it's someone, you know, posting it.

Yeah, but like veganism. Yeah, it's similar.

How do you know if someone's vegan?

They'll tell you. Yeah, I was that vegan.

But I suppose when you actually look at the, the study and the science behind it from a dopamine perspective. Yeah, it seems to be a no-brainer.

Yeah. I mean, specifically with the cold water, there's this big theory called the pain-pleasure balance by Dr. Anna Lembke. Chris Donnelly, Stanford University. Our brain has this area called the hypothalamus where we can experience pain and we can experience pleasure, and they operate on a seesaw. So for our ancestors, when you were hunting for 4 hours, that would be on the pain side of the seesaw, and it was designed that pleasure would begin to arise so that you would enjoy the experience of that hard activity, so you keep doing it. The same with rubbing the rocks together, building a shelter— pain created pleasure. In the modern world, the seesaw is effectively tipped when you mass engage with pleasure because the brain is also clever and knows that that's not the right path for us as a species. You go on social media for ages, then the pain begins to rise in the brain and you feel this discomfort, the same as with a hangover, the same with like post-porn, whatever it might be. The cold water is the like epitome of just banging the pain side of that system. And then this pleasure response begins to arise. And I think cold water is good. I think it's a very good training aid to teach you to do horrible things. And good mental health comes from doing things you don't want to do, like eating really healthily and going to sleep on time and exercising hard and staying off your phone. Like, it takes discipline to have good mental health. And cold water is horrific. Like, it's just a horrible thing to do, to turn your shower cold or get in an ice plunge pool. And, uh, it makes your brain very good at doing those things.

Can you help the audience understand how to get into flow state? I feel like if you're— if you are a writer or, yeah, an artist or an entrepreneur or whatever, if you are intentional about getting into flow state, then I think that you can have your absolute best working moments, but much more regularly than you think is possible.

Yeah, flow state, this deep state of focus. Flow was found by this guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He like studied artists and musicians athletes and saw this like monumental performance increase when people got hyperfocused on one thing. And a good way to know if you're in flow state is, is you kind of lose track of time. Time itself begins to dilate and you don't really track it so much. And when you're really bored, the opposite occurs. You begin to constantly think, oh, it's this many minutes have happened. And flow state itself is very good for dopamine. Our brain loves being in that deep state of focus. There are some really important parameters. If you're thinking about flow state on a computer, what typically happens is we sit down at our computer and we think, oh, I've got that really big project I need to do today, whatever it might be. It could be writing, could be content creation, could be Excel spreadsheets. Lots of things could get you into flow state. And we'll think, okay, I'm just about to do that and that is what I'm going to do in a minute. But I'm going to first just check my phone, see if there's anything that's on there. So just a quick— that depletes the dopamine a bit. Okay, so now I've accepted I'm not gonna go on the phone, and then it's like, oh, Google. So then it's Command+T, LinkedIn, and then it's like, right, okay, I'm gonna look at my LinkedIn notifications because that's an important thing to check. What if anything's happened there? And LinkedIn is same, it's random reward. You might have won from a business perspective, you might have not won, and it's very addictive, LinkedIn. And, uh, we basically spend 10 to 15 minutes depleting all of the dopamine resource, and then we go, right, now it's time for flow state. And then we've got this big mountain to climb in order to then get into flow state. And if you look at, say, an athlete, for example, when they get on the court at the Wimbledon final, if one of them was like just to scroll social media and start the match and the other was to really strategically warm up, one of them is obviously going to get into flow state a lot quicker because they were warming up the brain. And it's really important to sit down at your computer, not have the phone in the room. The phone cannot be in the room if you want to get into flow state, no way. Because you're always gonna get bored or something's gonna get difficult, and if the phone is there, it's getting picked up. And that's what gets us out of flow state, boredom or too much difficulty. And flow state occurs when we battle those two experiences and we just go fight the boredom, or we go through the hard challenging thing that's trying to stop this task happening. And that could happen with writing, for example. You might think it's a bit boring, or I can't really get this bit right, and then you give up. And it's in that battle, if you win the battle, the flow state occurs. And so you open your computer, you can't have WhatsApp and email and LinkedIn, you can't have anything— these things open because they're too tempting. You select the task, you tell your team or whoever you work with that that's exactly what's about to happen. I'm about to write for the next 60 minutes and I'm not going to be able to respond. And even if you're with people, you tell them just so you've got some kind of accountability outwardly that you're not going to then sit on your phone or go on other things. And then it takes about 15 minutes of staying hyper-focused on that thing to begin to enter what we describe as flow. And the first 15 are really hard. The bubbles are building in the brain and they're beginning to ship to the reward center. Dopamine starts to build. Once you've got a ton of them from the effort you've been putting in, it's like boom, now you're in flow. But that what am I going to do just before and once I'm on the computer, how am I going to avoid distraction? Those are the two things that are most important.

Important. I noticed this really practically. I travel, or have traveled, quite a lot for work generally. And if you're in a country where you're waking up later, uh, in the UK day— so for example, if I'm, you know, in, in America or whatever, I'm waking up 5 hours into the day— I can normally log on to my computer and finish the required work in like half an hour. Nice. Whereas if I'm in the UK and I'm, I'm getting those messages intermittently throughout the day, I'm like working on that stuff all day.

Yeah, you kind of dawdle through it all and constantly change.

And like, you're never— you're context switching the whole time. And so I've, I found like, if I want to be productive, I have, you know, ADHD, and I was diagnosed when I was like a kid, so I've been aware of it my whole life. Like, very intentional about time. But the other practical thing I've found recently is you can just obviously leave your phone downstairs, but you can just get one of those apps that just turns everything on the computer off. And so you're stuck with— I mean, if you're writing, because I'm writing at the moment. Yeah, you know, ChatGPT, very useful writing support. Uh, I don't know how people wrote books before.

Didn't come out when mine was right— when I was writing mine, then it came out.

I was like, fuck, that would have been good. Oh, it's amazing what you can do, obviously. But then having your whole computer— WhatsApp off, social off, etc. And then you're just with like a page and the best research tool in the history of the world. Then you can get into flow. And like, I wrote my book proposal. I left my phone— I, I just— ridiculous. But I checked into a hotel and I left my phone at the concierge downstairs, and I worked in my room for like 6 or 7 hours and barely ate, barely was aware of the day. And what you were hunting, effectively, your brain was hunting.

Yeah.

And what came out at the end of that day was probably the best work I've ever done. Wow.

And, and that's the thing is once you enter these really deep states of focus where like all the worries in your head begin to disappear, all the other shit in your life begins to disappear, time begins to disappear, and you just are like almost merged with the work. That's when like unbelievable levels of performance occur. And we don't really get there very often anymore. It's very— you have to be ridiculously intentional to access flow state. Whereas for our ancestors, there was no choice. Went out hunting for hours, you just straight into flow state. There's nothing, nothing to distract you. Then you're like, I'm going to build a shelter. Boom, flow state, because there's no distraction. Whereas now you got to be ridiculously strategic. Blocking everything on the computer is good. That even is just like excited my brain when you were saying that because I'm writing these proposals for the Dose Kids things. And if I was this afternoon, for example, to put my phone in another room and even block the computer and then just spend like 2 hours on it, I know my mental health this evening would be really good. Like, I know I'd be like, fuck, I'm so happy I've done that. And a lot of our mental health is disrupted by the feeling of knowing we have shit to do that we're not just taking action on and getting done. And it's like it just sits in the back of my head like, yeah, you need to do that thing, you need to do that thing. Whereas once you've done it, it's like, yes, I'm so happy I've done it. It's dope for me.

So I have that all the time. I have like a rotating to-do list in my head. It's hell. And it's hell. Yeah. I also think that's massively tied to drinking because like the minute that you drink that list evaporates. Yeah, it does.

You know what, there is no list. You know, this comes back on the next day, later that evening. Yeah, you know, it's like, boom, here's the list.

Yeah, don't forget about this, brain. And I think exactly, but I think it ties into like my next question, which is obviously there's activity we can do in our days, but there's also like what we feed ourselves and like the diet we put ourselves through. So like how can someone be more intentional about their diet to result in better mental health, productivity, happiness, etc.?

Yeah, for me, the nutrition world is obviously very complicated because there are a million diets that can work for a human being and be healthy. And there's a lot of opinion online. And part of the reason there is so much opinion is because all the human beings in the world that we are today didn't all evolve out of the exact same place. Our, like, our closer ancestors, some of them would have come from cold places, some by the ocean, some in the centre of forests, some deserts. So everybody's body is actually designed for a different diet because it would have spent 10,000 years, 50,000 years eating different diets. So the idea that all humans should eat the same diet is actually ridiculous because your microbiome evolved with your ancestral heritage. Some would have been super meat-based, some fish-based, some vegetarian, some fruit, and so on. For me though, I've tried to just massively simplify food so that I continue to eat healthy. And stay like physically in shape. And I know how much it affects my brain and my concentration. And I went through the process of really thinking like, what foods did our ancestors eat primarily? What would be the things like as an ancestor for hundreds of thousands of years, what would you have really thought? Oh my God, I can't believe I've managed to get hold of that product. And those things were meats. Like obviously if we ever got hold of meat, it was like, yes. And it was really like clean, healthy, fit, like deer and stuff like that. Like good quality red meat was like a big source of of our nutrition. If you ever found fruit, it was like, oh my God, I found fruit. Like if you actually were starving to death and then you found a mango, that mango would taste pretty good. And then honey was a big thing. And then dairy was a big thing. Like we would actually like the Hadza in Central Africa, for example, they are on the move with a herd of cows and they're like milking them and using the dairy in order to stay sustained. And my girlfriend now, she's a clinical nutritionist. She actually runs the nutrition at Dose Lab, and she oriented us towards this quite like ancestral focused diet where we were— we'd always look at our plate and it would be meat, fruit, and dairy being the main things that we were eating. And that's like not typically how we like make recipes and stuff. And this massively simplified things. Like it might be that I'm having some grass-fed burgers that I've just kind of put together from some grass-fed mince, put some like cheese on it. Cheese can be pretty good for you if it's good quality cheese, not like string crappy cheese, not full of ingredients. Then we'll have some like cucumber, some avocado, some like watermelon, super random, and I'll put some honey on the, on the beef. And I was looking at that meal thinking, what is this what we're eating now? And that diet where I've tried to simplify down to meat, fruit, honey, and dairy— then of course vegetables are amazing for you, rice is cool, sweet potatoes, all these things are great— simplifying it down to these meals that are kind of ancestral-based has meant our diet has become so much more consistent. Our capacity to manage the addiction to sugar is somehow way better because we're very saturated in the nutrients our body needs. So that's how we've begun to approach things.

By eating like that, that's actually increasing your productivity. It is because it's your energy.

Well, it's interesting, you've got two things at play there, because when food comes into our body, it breaks down into two different amino acids. You've got one called tyrosine and one called tryptophan. High protein things specifically will break down very well into these two amino acids. So things like eggs and meat and cheese. There are some additional things like sweet potatoes are really good. When these products come in, these very natural products, tyrosine itself, when it breaks down into that, builds the dopamine molecule. It's part of the building block of the dopamine system. So it literally is going to support the motivation that we have. Then the other, other element is this tryptophan component, which is a precursor to our serotonin. So when you're eating these natural foods, you're literally elevating dopamine and serotonin. So your energy level is much better with serotonin and your motivation is much higher with the dopamine. And we'll vary it. We eat lots of eggs in the morning, we eat some oats as well. Oats are good, but by and large we just basically have tried to completely eliminate ultra-processed food, all the foods that are full of all these different chemicals, because food is very, very addictive and when you look into these ultra-processed foods, and I'm not just meaning like McDonald's here, so much of the supermarket, 57% of the UK's calories that we consume are ultra-processed foods. So it's really high and they're all full of these random additives and gums and preservatives and all these different things that are very strategically designed to make your dopamine go mental and then to particularly make this hormone called ghrelin in your gut, which is your hunger hormone, go mental. And to turn off leptin, which is your satiation hormone that tells you you're full. So you basically start eating, dopamine goes nuts and makes you very motivated to eat. Ghrelin goes crazy and makes you insanely hungry, and leptin turns off and won't tell you if you're full. And then suddenly you end up with a relationship with food where you're like, fuck, I literally can't stop eating this stuff. And I really struggle with that. As you can imagine, with all the addictions, that was just another one in the pack. When you eat, say, for example, a grass-fed burger with some cheese on it and some cucumber on the plate and some avocado, and even some honey so it has like a sweet taste, your body is getting really sophisticated signaling that it's been receiving for hundreds of thousands of years that is leading to the ghrelin going, okay, I'm quite hungry, this is nice to be eating. But then the leptin is going to turn on quite quickly and say we've had enough. And you'll finish a meal and you'll think, I'm done, like I'm happy with that meal, I actually feel satisfied. And that ultimately just leads to a much better relationship with food, a better relationship with sugar, and then a much more stable dopamine system that leads to more consistent motivation.

I wouldn't say like I eat well all the time, but on days that I'm at home, I eat really well. Yeah. And I feel like on the days that I'm at home that I eat really well, I work really well, I have a much more chilled evening, and then I sleep much better. And I feel like, you know, it's all in my mind anyway, it's about like stacking good habits. And so like, how does someone nowadays intentionally sleep better? Because I feel like we started the conversation talking about how your iPhone and your social can just take over your life. If you're doing that before bed, yeah, people are like, why am I sleeping— why am I not sleeping well? Yeah, it's like, well, you've just watched 50 videos.

Yeah. So this is interesting. We basically— we've got this sleep hormone called melatonin, and like, you can now take like melatonin gummies and stuff because that's classic modern world. Let's just eat the thing that puts us—

yeah, not solve the thing. Although, I mean, I took melatonin for a long time. Yeah.

And I better go to sleep. And it's amazing. No doubt. But we want to basically— the game plan here is how do we get as much melatonin into our brain at nighttime as possible? The precursor to melatonin, the thing that builds it, is serotonin. So when you said, for example, that when you eat healthy at home, you sleep better, the healthy food has built serotonin in your gut that supported the creation of the melatonin. So food is a big part of how we're going to sleep at at nighttime. The natural foods are going to support our body's speed in which it can fall asleep and the quality of the sleep it has. Then it comes into the whole kind of tech world. How are you going to stimulate your brain to death at nighttime? Because that's what we love to do. There's even this phrase now, revenge bedtime procrastination, which is where you— and I didn't even know this is a thing. And I've never heard that. Really cool friend, clinical psychologist in America, and he was like, it's all over America. You need to talk about it on your Instagram. And I posted a story about it. We had something like 2,800 replies saying, I do that, I do that. Because effectively what it is is you've had a big day, maybe even helping your kids, maybe working hard, whatever it might be, and you get in bed and it's like me time. And you think, this is my time where I deserve pleasure, even though you know that true pleasure would actually be going to sleep because that's what your brain actually wants. But you think, no, that's not like conscious pleasure. So then it's like, I'm going to absolutely smash my brain with scrolling. Even to the point where the brain says, please let me go to sleep. And you're like, no. And then you just keep scrolling. Yeah, that's revenge bedtime procrastination. So we want to try and reduce that. And the goals here would be the earlier you can eat your dinner, the better by an absolute mile. You want to basically gradually treat yourself like a kid that eats dinner at like 5, 6 p.m. Gradually. That's a journey to get towards that. So you might currently eat at 8:30, you try and come back to 8. To 7:30 to 7. But everyone researching sleep at like a really deep level is discovering that the time in which you eat your dinner is the most important factor to what time you then fall asleep. Because not only does it enable the digestion to take place so that you can sleep faster, but it changes the whole evening if the, if the dinner is moved earlier because you've suddenly just set everything forward. So suddenly like your bedtime is slightly earlier, your chill time is happening earlier and so on. So moving the dinner earlier is significant and then trying to consume long-form content all evening, if you're going to consume content, is the goal. So when I sit down on the sofa, for example, I'm desperate for that like cool content period. I love consuming content, but that means on the TV, go to YouTube as an app and watch long videos on YouTube rather than sit on my phone and smash through content. If you can get to the point where you don't consume content in your bedroom, that's amazing. But if you're wanting to orient towards that path, I think it's so much better to have an iPad in your bedroom than a phone, and that can also serve as all the other barriers to not having your phone— alarms and being able to check your messages and calls and all that emergency stuff that never come, but we use that as an excuse to have our phones by our head. What if there's an emergency? Yeah, what if there's an emergency that's never happened, basically? And if there was, there's literally an emergency service that would actually be the people that solve that emergency. What would you do? So the iPad in the bedroom basically means that if you wanted to watch content, like if you felt, yeah, I want to watch content, you could put Netflix on, you could put YouTube on, you could listen to podcasts, you could do all that stuff, but you're not in mass, mass stimulation. And that's going to be a hell of a lot better for the brain. So I'd say earlier dinner and then moving towards longer form content using things like tablets and TVs is the best steps.

And I noticed you're not wearing a, like, Whoop, or you're not wearing a— I know, unless one of these, like an Oura Ring.

It's not an Oura Ring.

Is that something that you're into? Yeah, I feel like a lot of the conversations I have with people, they will be like, oh, you know, they didn't wake up necessarily feeling awful, but then they check their thing and they're like, oh, it's not bad today, I slept really bad. And it has sort of impact on their, on their day. What's your take on all of the, the technology? I mean, presumably, you know, something that's tracked can get improved.

Yeah, I think they are actually very useful, to be honest, if you're currently in quite unhealthy patterns. And I wore one of those trackers for a very long time. I basically quit booze because of Whoop, because I could not believe what it was doing to my data, the booze. Gonna get a Whoop. And I wore it about 3 years, super useful. I've now done about 12 months off of health tracking just because I wanted to make sure that I still had the capacity to intuitively decide how I felt. Like even, even with my dad, my dad's got like a Whoop and an Oura on. He's like doubled up. And my mum will be like in the morning, like, Thomas, how'd you sleep? And he's like, I don't know, I'll tell you in a minute. Once he's checked the data, like he can't even say how he slept anymore until he's been told. So I think it's important to still have the intuition. I do think they can be very useful for getting ourselves into healthier patterns and becoming more aware. I just think you can get like— I personally got very obsessive obsessive. Like, I'm just obsessed with everything. So I got— I'm sensing a theme. I got obsessed with that. I was completely addicted to it. I have though, literally yesterday, just ordered an Oura Ring. Okay. Yeah. So I'm about to re-enter the world of observing.

My wife wears an Oura Ring and she would swear by it.

Yeah, I, I like— it's more just for the fun of it. Like, I'm kind of just curious.

Sure. I mean, they're for, uh, women specifically. The Oura Ring, it has temperature tracking and therefore like loads of ability for fertility stuff. So that's cool.

Really, really cool. That's part of the reason my girlfriend was saying we should get Oura Rings was for that facility stuff, because we're in that world as well. So I may enjoy it. I think they can be useful. I just think you don't want to completely pass all your intuition within your body to the data. You want to have some understanding of how you feel yourself.

I want to talk a little bit about social connection and brain chemistry. So what is oxytocin? How does it affect people? Like, to the ordinary person hearing oxytocin, they won't necessarily relate that with connection, as it were.

Yeah. Oxytocin is a ridiculously powerful hormone. They refer to it as the great facilitator of life. And effectively, without it, there would be no life because it drives us to bond with one another from a social perspective, to form groups. It also bonds us from a romantic perspective. It makes the experience of sex feel great and procreation feel great. When a mum then gives birth, Hopefully your wife will do that in 6 months. Let's go. And when that happens, the mum and the baby have this huge surge of oxytocin that wakes up this part of the baby that thinks like, wow, these are my caregivers and these are the people going to support me. And you go through breastfeeding and all the physical touch. And effectively it's a hormone that just wants us to be very, very bonded as a species. We are a social species, like some species in the animal kingdom aren't. Like you take a polar bear, for example, it's pretty happy cruising around on its own. Humans in the wild are done for on our own. We don't physically have any capability against the animal kingdom, but we do have the capacity to form very sophisticated groups. Yeah, it wants us to be socially bonded and we are low in it in the modern world.

Because we have a lack of human connection.

Yeah, because we've decided that dopamine is more important. Effectively, we've begun to live in dopamine land where we think life is just about pleasure and success. That's become our primary mode of operation as a species. Whereas originally for our ancestors dopamine was so that you could experience oxytocin. You had to go and get the food because it was part of it and you had to make the fires that you were all not cold and you had to build the shelter so you could survive. But that was also that you could be connected as a group and laugh and have fun and used to sing and dance and everything was more oriented towards how do I get the oxytocin experience? Whereas now we get home from work, finally about to have oxytocin and it's like boom, straight back into the dopamine. Yeah. And we lie in bed with our partners and it's dopamine. We constantly choose dopamine out over oxytocin. And when our oxytocin is very low, our brain is a much more anxious brain. Because if you were cast out of the tribe as a hunter-gatherer, you were fucked. Like, you were not going to survive. And it would have been very anxiety-inducing if the oxytocin dropped. And biochemically, the oxytocin would drop. That person would feel so fearful that they'd be forced to to take whatever action was required to get themselves back into that group so they wouldn't die effectively. And nowadays, obviously, we don't have any, like, physical threats, but if you feel underwhelmed socially and not socially fulfilled, your brain's just going to be anxious. And a lot of us feel that way.

And there's a part of the book that you talk about— you actually talk about single people and relationships differently in their, uh, relation to oxytocin. So yeah, how do, how do single people, you know, deal with oxytocin? How to relationships deal with it?

Yeah. So when you're single, you can have oxytocin, you still receive oxytocin from all of your friendships and your connection and your family-based connection. So it's just important that when you are interacting with another human, you take some key steps that enable oxytocin to release. And those steps primarily are quite like physical attributes. So things like making eye contact leads to oxytocin going up, physically connecting with a human and hugging them leads to it going up. Active listening and really paying attention in a conversation will mean it will go up. There's this concept we call good questions, which is if you're in a conversation, sometimes it can be quite easy with the active listening to— when someone's talking, just be thinking your whole time in your head what you're going to say next and then just bang some information at them as soon as they finish. Active listening is just really paying attention and then responding. And even with these podcasts, for example, I had an interesting experience where When I first started doing them, I'd be kind of panicking about wanting to make sure I said the right thing or whatever it might be. And when someone was talking, I'd be thinking, what am I going to say to that? What am I going to say to that? Yeah. And it was actually disrupting my capacity to have good conversations. Whereas if I just listen and trust that a response will come, it's much better. And that happens across all communication. So you've got eye contact, physical touch, active listening, and then just asking really good questions. Just making sure you're not always talking about yourself is really important. Like, we all have those friends that you think, oh, they're a really good listener, or they're really good at asking questions, and they're basically really good at stimulating your oxytocin. That's why you love them. And it's important just in all, whether relationships or single, to just make sure that you, when you socialise, get rid of the phone and make sure you're very present in that experience.

And so in relation to a relationship and your partner, obviously no phone if you're in person is best. If you're apart from each other, we should be calling, not texting.

A lady called Seltzer found out that when you text one another, no oxytocin releases. And when you call one another, oxytocin immediately begins to release in the brain, this connection chemical. So yeah, when you're apart— like, my girlfriend's from Australia, we now live together here, but we did long distance for a period of time, which we met on Instagram. The irony that I'm so negative about social media, it literally brought me my whole career and my girlfriend. Well, if you used— well, you used to— well, it'd be useful. Um, but yeah, like, calling was a real priority even when we literally met there. And even a big priority for me— and this is good for single people and people in relationships— but a big priority for me was get out of the texting world and get into us calling and talking to each other properly. Because even when you look at dating apps, for example, it's all text-based and you're not releasing the hormone that's going to enable you to form a connection with the human you're trying to form a connection with. So whether in a relationship or single, cooling is very important. And then when you are in a relationship, you just want to really prioritise what connection actually is with each other. And that means sit on the sofa and cuddle more and hold each other's hands and talk to each other and have cool open conversations and pay attention and be interested in their life. And all of those things are reducing because we love scrolling our phones. They're basically all going down because we'd rather do this. And that just ultimately leads to that progressive breakdown in a relationship. Like, lots of people struggle with their sex lives now. Like, sex lives in relationships are reducing rapidly, quantity of sex people have. And the brain actually is different for the male and the female brain. The female brain is more oxytocin dominant than a male brain because they have like this huge caregiving component and they have to raise— they have to literally create a human with within their body, then they go through breastfeeding, and women have a lot of oxytocin. And when you look at something like sex, when a man suddenly gets stimulated, it's like, boom, I'm ready to rock, I'm ready to have sex. Whereas a woman has to go through more of like an oxytocin increase in order to reach a point where they would actually find true fulfillment and enjoyment in that sex. And that's why chatting and really connecting throughout the evening will actually then impact the likelihood of them having sex. And then when you get into bed simply just holding hands or cuddling or talking and laughing. All of these things are leading to the female oxytocin rising, meaning their desire to physically connect is increased, whereas the male brain has just got used to, I'm horny, watch porn, come, which is basically the path of sex. Whereas the female brain wants a lot more warm-up time than that. And these sort of things, how sexually fulfilled you feel in your relationship, are very important to your relationship. And it's really important to understand the reason these things are occurring is because of a lack of oxytocin because of an overprioritisation on dopamine from the tech in the evening.

It's amazing how much you can relate back to that, those terrible apps on our phone.

They are the source of our modern pain. They're also incredible, like I love them, but we're just currently overusing, using them. We're like a kid that found something exciting and can't do anything else. And there's a world in the future whereby we use technology for all its incredible capability and AI becomes a massive component of how useful it comes. But we also remember that we're humans and we spent 300,000 years without the tech and we have to do some of those things as well. And there's a balanced world where now I just think as I've gradually began to optimize my own dose and my partner's dose and so on, we're just so lucky that we get to have social media accounts where we can run our company and live this really like cool life and work and earn an income. But then we can also have the best of the old stuff as well and really connect with one another and spend time in nature and have our brain chemistry optimized. So there's this modern experience that can be the best experience ever as a human being. But then there's also modern experience that's like causing massive disruption. So we just got to be more aware as to the impact it's having and begin to get motivated for change.

Practical step I'd say I took in my life that I didn't necessarily know I was doing at the time was because my work has always been so social and, and, you know, social media and media dominated. I have a work phone that is like, you know, you can access everything in all of my companies at all seconds. You know, you can get onto Stripe, you can get onto all the social accounts, you can get into everything, you can get on Circle, etc. And it is like a full-on work phone. Like, I'll plug it into the computer and I'll just work with a, a keyboard. But then I have a personal phone that like pretty much no one has the number of, that has very few apps on it, and I mean, it has no social apps. The only thing it has on it is ChatGPT.

Nice. Because I feel like ChatGPT doesn't—

you're not addicted to ChatGPT in the same way.

No, it's not. It's not pure quick dopamine. It is, it's an interesting thing for our brain chemistry, but it's also incredible, ChatGPT. Yeah, I'm very optimistic about AI and mental health and where our world is heading.

I think so am I. I think the only, I mean, the only fear I have is that if the algorithms are as good as they are now, yeah, I feel like that was born in a time pre-massive takeoff of AI. They could only get more pervasive.

Yeah, it's interesting that because, yeah, if you're addicted to social media now, it will be a whole nother league in 10 years. It will be a huge new level. But then if you have the capacity to manage the addiction to the phone and then get to use AI, you're just going to be this absolute thriving being. Yeah. And I even watched— I watched the trailers, the new Black Mirror series that's coming out. It comes out in April. There was a phone in it. It's just like a quick clip, but there was a phone in it and it had a battery on it and someone was swiping up how much pleasure they wanted to just feel in their brain. So it's just like, because that's basically what we're doing on social media, we're just trying to like make our brain feel pleasured. We don't really give a shit about anything we're looking at on there, just occasionally. But I can imagine that in the future that we'll just have something where you can have a chip and you just go, pleasure, and then you just sit there and you just feel the pleasure. But it will destroy us. Like, it will not be a good thing to happen. And I would say if you start getting a hand of it now and you start thinking, okay, whilst we've got some chance of managing it, get really good at it, get really good at physical separation from your phone. Then all the insane stuff turns up and you'll be like, boom, I've been building a relationship with this stuff for 10 years. I know how to manage it. But stay in those addictive loops and you're going to find it hard.

The other thing I've seen you talk about I think is so important these days, but also is growing is people becoming such overthinkers. Oh yeah, you know, sort of paralysis by thinking and therefore resulting in no action. As in, I would say that when I speak to lots of people who want to start companies, they spend years making no action towards it and just talking about it. Yeah. And so how can people stop overthinking, and what, what's causing that paralysis?

Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a few components to this. Overthinking itself is interconnected with this serotonin system, and it's very interconnected with our nervous system. Our nervous system being in a very heightened state, we have this sympathetic nervous system which like increases our heart rate and so on. Everyone's heard of these ideas, fight and flight and rest and digest and so on. If you're in a more fight and flight, high adrenaline, high heart rate a stimulated experience, your overthinking is going to be more severe. Your thoughts are going to run more rapidly. And for our ancestors, that just simply meant see the tiger in the bushes, nervous system activates, heart rate goes up, overthinking effectively begins to occur as to what are all the possible ways that tiger could kill me? How can I get out of this? So it's just a really useful mechanism, overthinking effectively. And it used to negatively spiral as well, your overthinking, because it'd be like, how are all the worst things that could happen? And that's why when we get bad news now, we negatively spiral very quickly from like something bad happened with work and then you've concluded that you're not even going to have any money for your kids in 10 years. Like you, like you've done that within like 10 seconds of thinking. It's like, wow, we can overthink. So step one is really how do we actually just have a much more regulated nervous system? How do we calm this system back down? And the human experience is very overstimulating now. And there are some things around, for example, natural environments are absolutely unreal for our nervous system. There's this whole concept from Japan called forest bathing, which has Japan has gone deep into that. They call it Shinrin-yoku. And there's a lot of people in Japan that are struggling massively with mental health. They call it karoshi, where you just like burn yourself out from over-technology. And they put them on prescriptions into the forest and their nervous systems re-regulate themselves and their whole system settles and their stress reduces and burnout, depression and anxiety and so on. So the natural environments are non-negotiable. It's not like, oh, it'd be cool to sometimes go to nature. Is that you have to go to nature. If you live in a city, there's still nature, there's still parks, there's still Richmond Park in London and stuff like that. So we need time every single week regulating our nervous system there. I do really believe that we have to train our breathing system. We have to literally intentionally sit down and breathe in a certain way to regulate our nervous system even more. The nutrition will then also support this in terms of calming the nervous system. But I would say the nature and the breathing is so fundamental. You have to calm your body down so it doesn't just live in fear effectively.

So to wrap, what is the one change that you can point to in your life that took you from who you were, you know, self-proclaimed party boy, self-proclaimed— ask my friends, it was good— to who you are now? What if you were to break it down into one or two things? What were those things?

It's really annoying because I wish it wasn't this piece of advice, but the alcohol is probably like right at the fundamental core because I think it just kept holding me back from where I wanted to go. And I'd love to say it was something else because the alcohol one's so annoying, but that was really important, really, really important. Then I would say my phone, and I would say, uh, time in nature without technology. So like really getting a handle on how much social media I was consuming and moving into more of like, if I'm using social media, it's to take action and to learn something and then make content from it, but not just live in passive consumption and then just prolonged time in nature without your phone and headphones just absolutely changes your life. And no one's doing it. No one's going for walks for 2 hours without their phones. Like, that's not a thing. And I had this coach at university. He was my— he taught one of my lectures on mindfulness and meditation. Then he's continued to coach me for like the last 5 years. And he told me once that he went for a walk for 2 hours without his phone. And I literally thought, you're insane. You're mad. You're insane. Insane. What would you possibly do for 2 hours? Yeah. And then he just said, just do it.

Like, I bet so many people are even scared of the idea of—

terrible. I was terrified. I went out there and I literally had 2 hours telling myself I was an asshole. So like, I just thought, you're so stupid, you've done this, you're ugly, you're this, you're that. Like, just brutal. Like, the brain is brutal. But once it said it all, it lets it all go. That's like the interesting thing that you experience, is that once it's had its opportunity to tell you all that negative shit and actually really you talk through it with your brain, it begins to dissipate. And I did it. I just went on this walk. I did, I did like 40 minutes, I think, the first time I ever did this. 40 minutes, no phone, went out there. First bit was brutal. Second bit, I thought, I feel kind of good. Next day, started doing this more and more often. And I would say like the entire invention of DOS, my entire career, everything was built out there in the quiet, just like thinking it through. And I just don't think humans are doing it. I think we need it.

Well, TJ, thank you so much for coming on.

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